1980s
graeme.thomson
There are two fundamentally opposing schools of thought on Florence Welch and her mysterious machine. For the believers, her music belongs to the tradition of questing, modernist pop with a pagan trim of the kind Kate Bush made before she started writing 14-minute songs about having sex with snowmen. To the naysayers, on the other hand, she’s both shallow and contrived, a paint-stripping belter desperate to lend her sub-Siouxsie Sioux shtick gravitas by grafting on a skin of borrowed poses and studied weirdness.Neither view quite nails it. In reality, Welch makes occasionally stirring but Read more ...
graeme.thomson
A companion piece to last year’s Scratch My Back, on which Gabriel restrung classic material by the likes of Radiohead, Lou Reed and Elbow, New Blood finds the arch tinkerer dismantling some of his own greatest songs, stripping them of their rockist infrastructure (bass, guitar, drums) and rearranging them for a 46-piece orchestra.The two fundamental problems rest with the wide-ranging choice of material and the mode of reinvention: the fact that Gabriel has struggled to write anything of real magnificence for a couple of decades (hence why he’s doing this, Read more ...
ash.smyth
As Gary Numan strode out onto the stage last night, for the Shepherd's Bush leg of his Dead Son Rising tour, his black boots a-shining, his arms a-waving, his proto-emo knees a-bending, well, you couldn't say the crowd went insane, exactly - but they were very pleased to see him.For a man whose career was said to be all but over a quarter-century ago, Numan has done a hell of a job ignoring the bad news. His albums of recent years (four since the millennium) have created a new surge of critical esteem, and he is now openly lauded and acclaimed (and covered) by a generation of new musicians.If Read more ...